Daigle: Fidel Castro leaves a crazily complicated legacy

A woman cries as she waits to pay the last respects to Cuban revolutionary icon Fidel Castro, at Jose Marti's Memorial at Revolution Square in Havana, on November 28, 2016. A titan of the 20th century who beat the odds to endure into the 21st, Castro died late Friday after surviving 11 US administrations and hundreds of assassination attempts. No cause of death was given. Castro's ashes will go on a four-day island-wide procession starting Wednesday before being buried in the southeastern city of Santiago de Cuba on December 4. /RONALDO SCHEMIDT / AFP/Getty Images

The condolences and denunciations are coming thick and fast for the Cuban revolutionary leader, but his legacy is far more ambivalent – and undecided – than the polarised Cuba debate suggests.

When I was living in Cuba a few years ago, I had numerous conversations with Cubans about Fidel Castro – and about his death. The former president and revolutionary leader was unavoidable, insurmountable, in everyday chat as well as in Cuban politics and history.

As we sat on her patio in Santiago de Cuba, drinking icy glasses of beer, my friend Damarys threw her hands in the air. “He’s already dead,” she proclaimed. “This time, I am sure of it.”

Castro had not been seen in public for months at that point, and rumours were flying in Cuban cities and towns about the fate of their erstwhile leader.

It was only days later, though, that I sat in front of the television in my Havana sitting room and watched Castro pay a visit to the capital’s National Aquarium. Risen once again.

In one way or another, the former president has been dying for decades. He outlasted nine U.S. presidents as Cuban commander-in-chief, finally handing power to his brother Raúl in 2008. This in spite of the U.S. embargo and the CIA’s attempts on his life that number between eight and a mind-boggling 638.

In his lifetime, Castro also commanded a revolution, led the counter-offensive at the Bay of Pigs invasion and braved failing health for the last 10 years of his life. In 2009, he urged Cubans not to worry about his impending demise. Castro courted death, but death could not seem to claim him.

It’s easy enough to imagine that Castro’s obituary has been written and re-written more than any other world leader. Cubans and outsiders alike have believed him dead repeatedly through the years. As a result, his death, like so many of the exploits of his audacious life, seems almost distant, like it belongs to another age.

In Cuba, Castro was everywhere and nowhere. Like all Castro clan members, he was known by first name alone, but that name was not so often spoken. The nervousness that comes of a life of command patriotism meant that many referred to him only by nicknames like El Papa or signs like stroking their chins to indicate a beard. He was everywhere, and though nearly all the Cubans I met avowed a deep appreciation for his social programmes and anti-imperialism, they also knew the price of considering his faults openly.

Castro is a polarising figure – of this there is no doubt. He divides the world along lines of left and right, reformist and revolutionary, individualist and collectivist. He is a dictator, regularly burnt in effigy by the Cuban expat community and U.S. Republicans. He is a hero, an ally and friend of post-Apartheid South Africa and anti-imperialist struggles across the global south.

Castro universalised Cuba’s health care and education, lifted restrictions on women and Afro-Cubans, and provided aid to disaster-stricken zones from Pakistan to Haiti. But he also imprisoned thousands for “crimes” ranging from political dissidence to homosexuality – and he brought the world to the edge of catastrophic nuclear war. These are the checks and balances, not one of them inconsequential, that are filling announcements of his death.

Castro himself once said – facing trial for the 1953 Moncada Barracks attack, the putative first battle of his revolution – that history would absolve him. His legacy, like reports of his death, has always been more ambivalent than that. Both critics and supporters seem to believe the moment of his death, so long awaited, will bring about clarity. It may still be too soon for absolution or condemnation alike. And it may always be too soon.

Megan Daigle is a researcher and writer. She is the author of From Cuba with Love: Sex and Money in the Twenty-First Century. She tweets at @megandorothea.

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